ITDevCon 2011

I’m back from Verona from ITDevCon 2011. This was my 3rd time to participate in this biggest annual European Delphi conference. Same as in 2009 and 2010 the energy was very positive and Fabrizio’s crew from bitTime did a great job in making it attractive and interesting event.

The conference started from the keynote by Fabrizio, Daniele and David I and was followed by the "Delphi XE2 Overview" that I had a pleasure to co-present with David I. We were talking about all the cool stuff in XE2, including FireMonkey and creating Delphi applications for iOS, which David were deploying directly from his PC to an iPad. In fact the FireMonkey clock demo that David showed - created by Anders Ohlsson - has just been published on the Apple AppStore!

From this moment on the conference split into three tracks in three rooms conveniently named: "TObject", "TComponent" and "TForm". My next session was on LiveBindings in RAD Studio XE2. There are plenty of concepts to be explained and understood to start using LiveBindings in your applications like expressions, scopes and different specialized scope and binding components. During the preparation to this session I have found Jim Tierney’s last week CodeRage 6 conference sessions recordings especially useful. If you want to understand LiveBindings please go ahead and download Jim’s "Introduction to LiveBindings" and "LiveBindings: Practical Examples" session recordings.

My last session on the conference was "FireMonkey: Embarcadero Reinvents Application Development!". That was big fun and I think I have managed to convince the attendees that it is now the best time to invest time into learning FireMonkey, which is truly the application development platform for the future available today!

In my opinion the best sessions of the ITDevCon 2011 were by Bruno Fierens from TMS Software on custom FireMonkey component development. Bruno in his two part, step-by-step presentation explained everything Delphi developer need to know about FireMonkey, and specifically FireMonkey styles, to start writing components. I was impressed by Ray Konopka CodeRage6 "Creating Custom FireMonkey Controls" session a week earlier, but presentation by Bruno was simply outstanding and excellent! At the end of his session Bruno showed for the first time in public some FireMonkey components that his company is working on, including gauge, LED display, and compass controls.

In the evening there was a show by Italian country band and lots of fun including Daniele and Fabrizio singing. That was cool:-)

The second day was all about choices. Three simultaneous tracks with great content. I have finally decided to see Marco Cantu jQuery clients to DataSnap session and was unable to see "Going Functional" session by Primoz Gabrijelcic also known as "Delphi Geek"

ITDevCon 2011 was great! Bruno did fantastic job explaining FireMonkey component development and -while packing for my trip to Turkey for the Delphi XE2 launch in Istanbul - I’m looking forward to the next year!